Small blessings to count on a midweek winter morning, from Tom Junod at Esquire:
I watched the inauguration on Fox News. I admit there was some perversity involved — I wanted both to tremble with outrage and to gloat. I also wanted to remember why I liked Barack Obama, and there is no better way of liking Barack Obama than watching him on a network that pays people to hate him. His first term was questionable in many ways, but one thing was certain — he wasn’t them. He wasn’t Brit and Megyn and Brett and Chris, with their grievances and their grudges and their hurt feelings, and he wasn’t the man they were still half-heartedly defending, Mitt Romney.
Has anybody else besides Ann Romney mentioned Mitt Romney’s name since November 6? Has anyone watched Fox? The network once thought to be integral to Karl Rove’s “permanent Republican majority” now has to live down the election-night memory of Rove standing in the schoolhouse door between Megyn Kelly and the announcement that Barack Obama had won a second term. Roger Ailes created a news network designed to elect presidents, but he built it upon his own immortal and immortalized sense of injury, and now that he “lost” the election, the sense of injury is all that’s left.… Roger Ailes does one thing very well: white-guy disgruntlement. It’s a potent force, when there are enough disgruntled white guys. But now that the demographics are turning against him, all Ailes can offer is a fulfillment of his own paranoia…
(Some of you may be too young to catch the ‘standing in the schoolhouse door’ reference, which I thought was pretty damned perfect.)
Apart from jeering at nasty old overprivileged white men, what’s on the day’s agenda?
Villago Delenda Est
Reference to George Wallace defending segregation, for you whippersnappers.
Also, Junod is right on the money about Ailes. He’s always, since he started working for the criminal Nixon, been about white male butthurt. Nixon rode white male butthurt into the White House…it’s what the “Southern Strategy” was all about.
amk
There.
Raven
45 years ago today the Pueblo was captured.
Schlemizel
@amk:
You beat me to it!
@Raven:
And so was born the Hawaiian good luck sign
My mother was totally shocked when they published the picture in the paper.
Raven
@Schlemizel: She wasn’t the only one that was totally shocked!
And, of course, one week later Tet.
Patricia Kayden
I tried to watch Faux Noise on Monday, but could only stomach 5 minutes. So glad they’re miserable.
WereBear
Count me as someone who was quite unaware there was that much white male butthurt in the world; but fortunately it does not seem to be an inexhaustible resource.
Splitting Image
I just finished watching a Tarantino double bill: Reservoir Dogs and Pup Fiction.
Good movies, but kind of disappointed there were no actual dogs in them though.
WereBear
@Splitting Image: Considering how Tarantino treats his characters, I’m kinda glad.
MikeJ
@Splitting Image: Go see Django. It’s got dogs.
Linda Featheringill
White male butthurt:
Yes, we have an ample supply in this country.
In defense of the pale faces, though, let me say that you don’t have to be a white male to feel sorry for yourself. As a woman, I’ve often felt that self pity was inexorably tied to the Y chromosome and melanin or lack thereof made no difference.
In this particular case, though, it is the white males who are losing something: power and position. They are whining because of their loss.
That is one reason why so many of them are working to separate women from contraception. A lot of independence for women did come with The Pill.
I think it’s also why so many of them are against abortion, too. It is difficult to believe that so many of those jerks give a fucking damn about an unborn fetus. They just don’t want the women to be free and unfettered.
Be that as it may, the times they are a-changing. For the better.
danielx
Today will be filled with the joy of buying a new electric range, since last night the old one emitted a “brrrzzz” electric noise while the broiling element shot sparks all over the oven. (Had to finish the chicken in the microwave, ugh.) It’s 23 years old, so I suppose it’s time.
Re: white male butthurt – yep. There’s a reason so many lower middle class white guys go off the deep end at any hint of additional gun laws. Their butthurt runs deep enough already, and now Obummer is going to take away their dicks, er, guns – the last remaining inviolable symbol of their identity as superior beings.
kay
Messina said, at the OFA meeting, ” they didn’t see it coming” and that really WAS the best part for me. All that crazy frantic effort going on right under their noses and they missed the whole thing, obsessing on national employment rates and Carter v Reagan and their vague collective conclusions about “the country” while we were counting early voters.
That was just straight up fun to watch.
Anya
White male butthurt is the reason for:
Transvaginal ultrasounds,
Global warming deniers
Guantanamo is not closed yet
DOMA
Voter suppression tactics
And a host of other monstrosities that impede progress.
Can we work on a cure for this destructive disorder so that we can eradicate it once and for all.
AL, thanks for introducing me to ‘standing in the schoolhouse door’ reference. I gotta find a copy of Robert Drew’s 1963 documentary film Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment. It sounds interesting.
Baud
@kay:
It’s really amazing. Even when some on our side would freak out, I was always serenely confident about the outcome of the presidential election. Maybe I was delusional about the risk, but if Romney had won, I would be feeling the same way the GOP is feeling right now.
Splitting Image
@WereBear:
Good point.
Linda Featheringill
@kay:
It was scary. We had early indications that our methods were effective and so we doubled down on them. This was yet another instance when accurate information was very, very, very important.
The Republicans seemed totally oblivious to all the effort and drama among the Blue voters. I thought they were lying to their base in order to get a good turnout. But it looks like they weren’t lying. They were just wrong.
Among Republicans are a lot of people who know that wishful thinking has no place in a political campaign. Were these folks blind? Were they not heard above the din? Were they accused of being RINOs if they uttered a discouraging word? What happened?
amk
@kay: Obama campaign team is full of smart devils.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
NFL fans may want to check out TNC’s piece (which points to a Frontline piece): The Impending Death of Pro Football.
(also pointed to here.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ramalama
Yeah everyone feels sorry for themselves at some point. Even singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright, who wrote the best anthem about that.
Schlemizel
@Raven:
Were you in country for that party?
I was still in High School but it made a huge impact on me. Not just because I had a good friend there but it changed my opinion on the propaganda we had been fed up to that point. Maybe it was just me but I think Tet was an enormous turning point in the future of the US and we don’t even recognize it.
Betty Cracker
Watching the Fox News freak-out live on election day will always be a cherished memory. SO glad I decided to tune in. :-)
What do y’all think about Israel’s election? Looks like Netanyahu has been undercut, which seems to be a Good Thing.
Also2, how viciously will the GOP go after Hillary Clinton today during the hearings? If they’re smart, they’ll tread carefully. But they aren’t smart.
Death Panel Truck
Right wingers also want white women to start pumping out more babies, in order to keep the white male American from becoming an endangered species. They can’t imagine a day when white male privilege will be meaningless, but it’s coming nonetheless.
agrippa
The GOP lost because they had little to offer, and did not know it. And, the GOP did not do the work necessary ( the ‘ground game’).
The GOP is not going away. They have about 47% who vote for them no matter what; and, much of the country is safe GOP.
The GOP is not done by any means.
Schlemizel
@Betty Cracker:
If she were smart she would bring X-rays with & remind them how they talked about her injury!
Love the fact that 2 days ago the Nice Polite Republicans were telling us how Bibi was going to have to go harder right & make a coalition with the worst of the worst (my representation of the party NPR said would be the big winner). Now, suddenly he is going to move ‘left’ because he didn’t do so well & their wingnut brigades failed bigger than our own.
The world is conspiring to wreck this sense of gloom and doom I have cultivated while watching it fall into the hands of wingnuts.
Schlemizel
@Splitting Image:
I don’t know that I agree. Look at Pulp Fiction for example. The ‘good guys’ in this case Bruce Willis & his GF get by pretty unscathed. Sure the ‘bad guys’ , particularly Travolta and Zed don’t fair so well but put that movie into the hands of a lot of directors & I think the body count would be higher and not as ‘just’.
raven
@Schlemizel: Yep, they actually sent the Blue House Raid team through our AO a few days before so we were on high alter anyway. We had nothing, basic load for both our small arms and arty. If they had come in force we wouldn’t have lasted long enough for the nukes to get there.
eta I was in Korea, I didn’t get to thge Nam until the following September.
Linda Featheringill
I find Israeli politics to be even more Byzantine than our own. But if these voting numbers point to a leftward tug, that would be a good thing. Definitely.
Kay
@Linda Featheringill:
Obama had a huge advantage, and it was 2008. They could take the 2008 early vote numbers, county by county, down to the precinct, and compare them to 2008 and then compare THAT to 2008 election day numbers. That way they weren’t relying on polls. They were looking at actual vote.
Early voting is an absolute god-send if the campaign strength is organizing, because we weren’t persuading those “sporadic” voters (they were already decided) we were just ensuring that they voted. I’m not sure Republicans can make that up, because they don’t have huge issues with “sporadic: voters (not to the extent that Democrats do). Their voters are more reliable. They don’t have a lot of votes to “find”.
I was surprised to see the (registered Democrats) in my precinct who were identified as “sporadic” because I know a lot of them and bet if I had asked any of them they would have said “I vote every election”. Actually, turns out, they don’t.
J.D. Rhoades
@kay:
They were depending on liberal and minority disillusionment with Obama to keep voter turnout down where voter suppression couldn’t. I suspect they’d been reading a lot of liberal blogs, which, let’s face it, were hotbeds of left-wing butthurt.
What they didn’t take into account was how badly their stated policies were pissing off LGBT people, women, African Americans, Latinos, and anyone who was related to or friends with people in those groups.
MattF
The winger media establishment tried, for four years, to ‘Carterize’ Obama– and they failed. All of them– Limbaugh, Drudge, Ailes. The voters have pushed the handle on the Big Toilet, and the right-wing media are getting a foreboding of where they’re headed.
Kay
@J.D. Rhoades:
It was weird to talk to local Republicans, because they were so confident. They’re always more confident than Democrats, but this was exceptional. I heard the word “toast” a lot. They decided back in March that he was going to lose, so I feel as if the media timeline is off. This was before the debates and the whole skewed polls nonsense. They decided based on nothing, basically. Vapors. Gut. What they read on Facebook.
Just this complete divide, between what I thought I was seeing and what they were saying.
I was thinking “one side of this is completely wrong, and I hope it’s not my side” :)
jibeaux
@Kay: There’s a reason why Stephen Colbert said:
rlrr
@Raven:
It’s also Bounty Day….
J.D. Rhoades
@Kay:
They decided based on nothing, basically. Vapors. Gut. What they read on Facebook.
And saw on Fox.
I went through the same thing with the local wingers. And every single one of them bragged–bragged! that they only got their info from Fox News.
debbie
Not that so much as they only listened to themselves. They had no idea that anyone could be more pissed off at a candidate who embodied Wall Street than a black guy.
All Republicans seem to be doing since the election is doubling down on the kind of things that cost them the election. I can’t imagine it will be any more successful the second time around.
One bright light is that this hopefully will be the end of stupid statistics like the one about Presidents with less than 50% approval ratings never getting a second term.
James Hare
The Washington Post has reached new levels of absurdity in their article on the Republican power grab in Virginia:
“Shame on the witless Democrats for not anticipating that Republicans, given the chance, would resort to dirty tricks.”
Yes — now the Democrats should feel shame because the Republicans pulled a dirty trick. They’re supposed to assume bad faith on the part of their counterparts in the state senate. For the paper addicted to sweet sweet bipartisanship it’s a real eye-opener to see that legislators should simultaneously assume bad faith in their governing partners AND work hand in hand with them to achieve good outcomes.
Minitrue at least made sense.
TR
@Villago Delenda Est:
How young do you and Anne Laurie think the rest of us are here? 12?
Tell me more about this incredibly obscure moment in American history known as “the civil rights movement.” Martin Luther Who Now?
MattF
@James Hare: And, of course, if any of those dastardly partisan Democrats ever publicly stated that they don’t trust Republicans, the Post would decry that, too. They’ve crossed some line, from self-parody into a netherworld where nothing actually makes sense.
Raven
@rlrr: Cool!
Mark S.
@TR:
Sit down here sonny and let grandpa tell ya about Watergate.
Litlebritdifrnt
@MattF:
I was listening to Hannity in the car yesterday and some guy called in and began his comments with “I couldn’t stomach watching the inauguration but I thought his speech was terrible”. I kid you not.
Kay
@debbie:
I heard that a lot, and I heard “8% unemployment” a lot. So I would ask, okay, if it’s 8% or worse on election day and Michele Bachmann is your nominee, Obama will lose? THEN they’d admit it’s not as simple as “8%”.
I heard the same thing about Romney/Mormon. Republicans here who don’t like Mormons told me Romney would never win the nom because THOSE OTHER fundie religious (not THEM of course, they’re open-minded) would never vote for him. So I’d ask “who else, though? who else CAN you nominate, out of this field?” They didn’t have an answer there either.
Schlemizel
@raven:
the only thing my friend would ever say about Tet was, the shit got real. He’d only been there about 2-3 weeks & I don’t think he had been in any combat during that time. Hell of a way to start.
I wish there was some way the nation could apologize for what we did to you guys (to say nothing of the Vietnamese)
J.D. Rhoades
All Republicans seem to be doing since the election is doubling down on the kind of things that cost them the election.
And those who aren’t (Joe Scarborough, Colin Powell, Chris Christie, to an extent) are being savagely derided as RINOs.
Their party’s already beginning to fracture–every time you read that sneering little acronym, another crack develops, until soon they’ll be so consumed with infighting that even the yokels in the red state gerrymandered districts lose patience and boot them out. Meanwhile the old angry rabid wingers will continue to die off, thrashing and foaming in their last throes of spastic rage, their final breaths a reedy, pitiful wheeze of “ooobaaaama liiieed about Benghaaaazi…” and everyone will go “what the devil was that old fool babbling about?”
Raven
@Schlemizel: FIDO
Mark S.
I think Bill Callahan is a crappy coach but I doubt he threw the Super Bowl. I am also unaware that changing a game plan can cause bipolar disease. But it is interesting the player quoted defending Callahan basically says the coach hated his players.
Yutsano
@J.D. Rhoades: This is what I’m seriously not getting: what DO they want Obama to admit about Benghazi? Or they just want him to resign over it and not bother to explain the why?
aimai
@Kay:
Very interesting.
J.D. Rhoades
@Yutsano:
They’ve been desperately looking for the “Gate” that’ll bring The Kenyan down: Solyndra, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, etc.
But it just hasn’t happened, because there’s really nothing criminal in any of it. Some major screwups, yes, and a couple of minor ones, but no criminal act that would lead to impeachment followed by resignation (because they know the Senate wouldn’t remove him).
So they’re screaming “coverup” because reality doesn’t conform to the right wing fantasy they furiously wank to every night while watching Fox.
JPL
@Yutsano: We’ll find out soon. Cspan will cover the hearing on Cspan 3 or you can stream it.
First question, “Did you cover up the murder of Vince Foster?”
Mark S.
@Yutsano:
They’re grasping at straws. It’s funny how their outrages du jour don’t catch on with the public anymore. I bet 73% of the country couldn’t tell you anything about the Fast and the Furious except it starred Vin Diesel.
debbie
@ Yutsano:
What I’d like someone to point out at the Clinton hearing is that if there had been just a fraction of this outrage at the sitting administration’s negligence on the day that 2,900 people were murdered, Benghazi might never have happened.
Suffern ACE
@Yutsano: my guess is that the want him to be impeached because they have been told that this is the most serious crime and coverup since Watergate and the worst foreign policy disaster since the sale of the Panama Canal to the Muslim Chinese. There’s lots of old Republicans who think Nixon wasn’t a crook, and won’t stop trying to remove Democratic Presidents until they finally get one.
Yutsano
@Mark S.:
What has been done has been witnessed. :)
And yeah, I can see how they would want to overturn the results of the election like that. They do realise Willard doesn’t get installed automatically, amirite? Then it’s President Joe and WHOO-DOGGIE!!
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Yutsano:
How quickly we forget. During the Clinton administration the Republicans held hearings and took 140 hours of testimony while investigating whether or not the Clintons had misused the White House Christmas card list.
JPL
The house hearings aren’t until two. I assume that the house hearings will be the one’s where Hillary smacks them down.
Kay
@aimai:
In 2010 my daughter was living in Pennsylvania with 3 roommates. They all said they would vote. They’re not intensely “political” but they were all alarmed at the Tea Party. She’s the only one of the group who actually voted, and I think she did because I called her and asked her if she had voted “yet,” on election day.
Suffern ACE
@Mark S.: I thought the story was odd. It’s based on the notion that Callahan so loved John Gruden and hated Oakland (nation against the world!) that he purposefully decided to pass against the Nfls best run defense.
J.D. Rhoades
@JPL:
Part of me really hopes they do try to bully Secretary Clinton like that. I’ve had my disagreements with Mrs. Clinton, but the lady is tough. Fuck with her at your peril.
JPL
Uh Oh .. Why is Hillary wearing green? Is that to show her support for the Arab League.. Just wondering..
MattF
@J.D. Rhoades: There’s also the ‘free at last’ factor, since she’s going on vacation for a few years. I’d be polite– getting hit by a passing freight train hurts.
J.D. Rhoades
My prediction: Secretary Clinton will answer every question forthrightly and honestly, after which the Republican Committee members will scurry out of the hearing room to the TV lights and solemnly claim “we still have a lot of unanswered questions.” A few days from now, the hearings will stumble to a close with no Administration ending scandal revealed, and “Obama Lied About Benghazi” will live on as one of the right wing articles of faith. And by “articles of faith” I mean things they believe in despite–or perhaps because of–the total lack of proof.
Mark S.
@Suffern ACE:
Yeah, I don’t remember that Oakland team really well, but weren’t they mostly a passing team? I don’t remember who their running back was, but I remember they had Gannon, Brown, and Rice.
Anya
With that opening Hillary is killing it already.
JPL
@Anya: yup
Emma
@Anya: AAARGH. What did she say? What did she say?!
Chris
@WereBear:
I didn’t realize quite how much of it existed until 2008.
Must be exhausting to be that consumed by it…
Anya
@Emma: She talked about all the previous attacks and linked it to a need for a broader strategy to address these security concerns. No denial of support and no delay in response. “We can’t conduct diplomacy from a bunker”. Great openning. Loved her speech.
aimai
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Oh yes. Hillary, of all people, has been through this before.
Tone in DC
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Now that… that figures.
I guess these are the same people on imdb.com who review a movie that they’ve never seen (and only just happened to catch a few seconds of the preview of same).
Chris
@Linda Featheringill:
Yeah. I understand the concept: an unborn fetus is a full human being and therefore deserving of the protection such human beings deserve. Fine. If you take it for granted that a fetus really is a full human being, I can even understand (on an intellectual level) the people who say they should be protected even if they’re created by rape.
Here’s the problem: when you take their political views in any kind of broader context, the notion that SoCons are actually driven by concern for the fetus (okay, the baby) becomes laughably impossible to believe.
First, because of their attitude to life before and after pregnancy; these are the same people who want to make protected sex (which would mean no life created in the first place and therefore no dilemma) as close to impossible as they can, and abolish any and all services that actually help the baby and those raising him after birth.
Second, because if you accept their “it’s a defenseless human life that deserves protection” worldview, that would literally be the only time these people have EVER sided with a defenseless human life against those with the power to snuff it out. Their entire fucking political history is one of siding with the rich and powerful against the poor and powerless; these are the same people who rose up and fucking cheered when Ron Paul said that people too poor to afford health insurance should just fucking die already. I’m supposed to believe that for the first and last time of their lives these people suddenly grew a conscience?
Not seeing it.
aimai
@Kay:
Absolutely, Kay. People say things that they really think are true (“I’ll vote”) but actually getting to the polls is subject to hundreds of tiny delays and distractions that make it true only until the polls close when lots of people discover, really to their own surprise, that they didn’t get there in time. One of the signal accomplishments of the Obama campaign (I think) is that they really cannilly leveraged what is known about human behavior generally to shift the balance slightly in their favor. The whole FB “make a plan” project which encouraged canvassers to ask voters whether “they have a plan for voting” was genius. When we went door to door the campaign had as part of its app a very functional clickable link to order up a car for a specific voter if they said to you that they needed a ride. The job of leaving no votes to chance is a huge one and they dealt with it not by getting bent out of shape with any one voter but by removing stumbling blocks from in front of all the voters. If the new OFA and the Obama administration can bring this perspective successfully to voting rights legislation the dems will turn their sporadic voters into regular voters with no trouble. But, of course, the Republicans are aware of that and will be pushing back.
Chris
@kay:
It really was. I knew they were fucking delusional and living in a fantasy world when it came to many issues, but before this election I never would have dreamed that the fantasy world extended so far that they’d actually try to sweep polling results under the rug, stick their heads in the sand and make-believe that the election was going their way. I thought they loved power enough that election politics would be one of the few fields where they still paid attention to reality.
Clearly, I was wrong. Not that I’m complaining.
Kay
@aimai:
I felt as if we were wringing every vote out. I had this hilarious experience election day, where this woman just started laughing, really laughing, bent over giggling, at how many times she had been contacted. She’s RIGHT. It IS a little ludicrous, and she was so good natured about it!
But. The thing is, I was sent over that way at 5 PM when they were having the traditional Ohio 5 PM election day nervous breakdown and she still hadn’t voted :)
So it’s silly or whatever but it’s also (apparently) necessary with our voters.
aimai
@Kay:
Well, its necessary with our voters and with our voting system. I mean: its crazy that people have to take an unspecified amount of time off of work (unpaid) to go stand in line at their home precinct when many/most people work sometimes an hour away from home by public transport. If your voters are young, working full time, don’t have a car, work by the hour and you deliberately hold voting day in this way you are bound to find that many of “your” voters simply can’ tmake it, even with a good faith effort on their parts.
I live in a blue city in a blue state and apparently we don’t have regularized absentee voting (that is, you need an “excuse” like you are very old or out of town) because the people who would push for that think it would make it too easy for lots of the wrong kind of people (college students, lazy people, democrats) to vote. Even the *&^ clerks and inspectors who are literally working all day voting day helping people vote are not permitted to absentee ballot–you have to leave the precinct where you are working during your brief lunch break and go home to your “real” ward and precinct to vote in person. Its nuts.
Fred
The reason the top dogs in the GOP were surprised at the turn of fortune is they had the black box machines rigged and something put the fix on their fix. You could almost see Karl clenching his teeth to stop from screaming, “We stole it fair and square!”
I have an incling that the “Anonymous” message claiming to have hacked Rove’s hack was the real deal. But then I’m just a conspiracy nut. If there really is a conspiracy am I still a nut?
Cacti
@Chris:
Not just try to sweep the polling data under the rug, but actively try to demonize the statisticians who were bearers of bad news.
i.e. “Nate Silver is wrong because he’s a limp wristed homo, and what do they know?”
Higgs Boson's Mate
@kay:
We were also advantaged by the fact that the Republicans found it inconceivable that we’d vote to re-elect a black president in a down economy. I think that’s one of the reasons for the clown show during the Republican primaries; the Rs believed that any white guy would beat Obama.
Kay
@aimai:
Right, that’s why I was so worried about Pennsylvania. They really do have the most restrictive scheme in the country.
Early vote is popular. Once it goes in it will be impossible to undo. People really like it, Republicans, Democrats, whoever.
flukebucket
@Raven:
My God how time flies!
Kay
@Chris:
But it was more than “them”. It was (supposedly) smart media, too. I didn’t watch much cable during the election, but I did catch Ryan Lizza piously intoning on how liberals were underestimating Michele Bachmann. The implication was that we doing that because we don’t understand evangelicals, or The Heartland, or …something. But that wasn’t it at all. I didn’t take Michele Bachmann seriously because she behaves like a lunatic and I was quite confident she wouldn’t win the primary because she’s not a national candidate. HE’S the one who was making assumptions about evangelicals and The Heartland, not me. It’s oddly patronizing, really. It’s like how they all were telling me that women (Clinton voters, no less!) here would love Sarah Palin. Why did they think that? It’s ridiculous.
Chris
@Fred:
Yeah, that was the other thing I loved about this election. That they put SO much effort into suppressing Democratic votes in swing states and it STILL wasn’t enough to swing it. If you’re getting so unpopular you can’t even cheat your way to victory, you’re really up shit creek.
@Cacti:
Yeah, I think that’s what offended me the most about this entire election cycle – the number of people who simply said “oh yeah, well, fuck the pollsters, because facts be damned, I just have a feeling.” Yeah, that’s nice. What a shame that the world doesn’t turn entirely based on your fucking “feelings.”
But to be fair, from what I understand, the reason Romney, Rove, Ryan and a lot of the higher ups believed they were winning was that their underlings running the campaign on the ground were assuring them that they were. Whether that’s because they were afraid to be fired it they brought bad news or because they were just running a scam on their bosses, I don’t know. (Probably quite a few of both).
dww44
@aimai: What state is this? Even my red red state doesn’t make voting this difficult:
Mike in NC
We’re fortunate that we have Ailes and FOX to keep the low information voters so delusional. Hopefully that won’t change when the old bastard is replaced.
aimai
@Cacti:
“Nate silver is wrong because he’s a limp wristed homo” and “Look at David Axelrod and compare him to Mitt Romney–who would you trust to run your campaign” (if you guys remember that gem?). Both were nearly 100 percent proof, picture perfect, versions of a right wing conviction which is that there is nothing that is independent of authoriattive persons. There aren’t facts unless the “right kind” of person authenticates them and there aren’t campaigns run by professionals there are campaigns run by people who look like professionals. Appearance, status, identity politics–Mitt Romney would be president if everyone thought like a Republican because people who look like Mitt Romney and are like Mitt Romney should be President. Ipso facto becauso I saidso.
Its one reason they made such poor arguments for Romney–because to them it was self evident: clean cut white guy with lots of hair and money! What more needs to be said?
aimai
@dww44:
God damned Cambridge Mass, right smack in the middle of Massachuesetts Ma. Our beloved Commonwealth, god save her!
quannlace
It’s interesting to imagine what kind of speech Romney w ould have given if he’d been standing up there. Probably full of American exceptionalism (past) and how to get it back. Code phrases for tax cuts and deregulaiton, so we can set those job-creators free!
ruemara
Maybe that’s what I’ve been feeling, white male butthurt. A little misplaced coming from me, but it seems to be the only butthurt that’s allowed in this world.
Chris
@Kay:
Yeah, “you don’t understand Real Americans” is a recurring trope on their side of the aisle… and among those who’ve gotten used to it dominating, which unfortunately includes the media and much of the supposed “center” of our politics. It’s supposed to have an elemental, terrifying vibe of “you don’t know what you’ve unleashed,” like in all these movies where somebody wakes the dragon or the mummy or the Balrog. In practice it’s just the grown-up version of a teenager whining “you don’t know me.”
jp7505a
According to that ‘patriot’ Ted Nugent ‘”The president of the United States goes to the Vietnam Memorial Wall and pretends to honor 58,000 American heroes who died fighting communism and then he hires, appoints and associates with communists,” Nugent said. “He pretends to pay honor to men who died fighting communism, and then he hangs out with, hires and appoints communists. He is an evil, dangerous man who hates America and hates freedom. And we need to fix this as soon as possible.”
Since we just had an election in which WE The People could have voted Obama out of office if we had wished, that last sentence sounds very much like a threat. Since the ‘patriots’ didn’t win at the ballot box they will resort to bullets. Hopefully this pond scum gets a visit from the secret service, again.
A lot of things were said about Bush/Chaney, many of them intemperate, on blog comments but I don’t remember these kinds of threats from major (ok in this case a minor) public figures. Limbaugh is constantly harping on the fact that no one will stop Obama. This kind of language puts ideas in unstable minds or legitimatizes them . Several years ago a man shot up a church because he could not gain access to the 100 most dangerous liberals in Bernie Goldbergs book. Word, spoken and written have consequences and not always for the good.
Chris
@aimai:
Really? I always thought it was because they themselves weren’t convinced. Fucking Mormon heretic, faggy New England elitist, ex-pro-choice pro-gay Obamacare-inventing liberal, etc. I saw a hell of a lot more “Obama doesn’t deserve a second term” than “Romney deserves to be president” from them as their argument for why they were voting like they were.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Chris:
You have to understand, these people are the salt of the earth. The common clay. You know — morons.
Matt McIrvin
@Linda Featheringill:
I think there’s a minority of them, more likely to be hardcore right-wing Catholics than evangelicals, who actually do. There was one of these guys in a Usenet group I used to hang in. I think he was sincere, because he was seriously obsessive about it: every conversation he had with anybody, online or apparently in the real world as well, if it went on long enough, eventually circled around to the beyond-Hitler-scale Holocaust of babies surrounding him on all sides. It seriously disrupted his day-to-day existence, trying to live in a world in which he knew that almost everybody he met was an accessory to the mass murder of millions of babies, and he’d complain about that online.
Most people with apparently extreme anti-abortion sympathies seem to be more functional, though, and, yeah, that suggests to me that they haven’t thought about it that hard.
aimai
@Kay:
I think we were supposed to believe that Michelle Bachmann was the representative of a hitherto unknown tribe, the evangelicals, and that we couldn’t predict her chances because we didn’t speak their language. That was such crap–I get that she speaks evangelical and that evangelicals, because they are obedient authoritarian followers, comprise an important voting block in her district. That information–widely avaialable to all–directly translates into not worrying about her because the kind of voter who finds her atractive as a politician isn’t actually very numerous in the general population. These god damned self appointed interlocutors and translators for the voters from crazy-town (Like that idiot Amy Sullivan who is alla time explaining that the religious right has a point that we immoral atheists can’t grasp) think they need to translate for us because we are speaking a minority lanugage–but we aren’t. IT is their little pocket o’ crazy people who are becoming irrelevant statstically and demographically speaking. Soon we won’t need to care what these people say they think anymore than we need to craft all our laws and policies for the benefit of the Amish.
Matt McIrvin
@Fred: I don’t think they ever had a nationwide voting-machine fix in. What makes that hard to do is that there isn’t a nationwide system to hack (if there ever is one, it definitely needs transparency and paper ballots). They’d have to mess with thousands of individual election boards across the country.
It is, however, obvious that they tried every means at their disposal to suppress minority voting in swing states with Republican governments, and it just made people mad and motivated them to come out and vote.
I think the Romney campaign in particular was genuinely deluded. People were telling them what they wanted to believe. That can seem like the supreme confidence of someone who’s rigged the game, whether it is or not.
Matt McIrvin
@aimai: I think those analyses are from people whose minds are forever stuck in 1976 and 1980, when “born-again Christians” suddenly became the crucial swing voting bloc in the United States, and nobody in the mainstream news media had a handle on where this was coming from. (That it was the same people targeted by Nixon’s Southern Strategy would have been the easy answer, but it wasn’t clear at the time, especially when they voted for Carter in ’76.)
Kay
@aimai:
What gets lost, I think, is that THAT IS “elitist”.
It was absolutely incredible to me listen to them pontificate on Palin. That somehow middle class and working class lean-GOP women have NO aspirations for their children, so would therefore be impressed on how “real” Palin’s family is. EVERYONE wants their kids to do well, go to good colleges, etc. EVERYONE. ALL parents dread a teenage pregnancy. The assumption was that a certain “class” of women would “connect” with Palin, and it didn’t even matter if those women were Clinton supporters!
Villago Delenda Est
@jp7505a:
The irony of a draft-dodging by pissing and shitting his pants coward like Nugent being so offended by Obama paying tribute to those who lost their lives in Vietnam is laughable.
This vile coward deserves to die a thousand deaths…and then some. What a pathetic excuse for a human being Nugent is.
bemused
@Matt McIrvin:
PPP poll this week, 45% of MN Republicans from very conservative to moderately conservative want Bachmann to run against Al Franken.
jp7505a
@Villago Delenda Est: I would contribute to the fund to have him staked out on a fireant hill:-)
Villago Delenda Est
@Matt McIrvin:
The irony with regards to Carter is that Carter’s movement to end the tax-exempt status of the all white “Christian academies” that were created as a direct response to school integration is what motivated segregationist scum like Jerry Falwell to form the “Moral Majority” (which was neither), and get the fundies involved in secular politics.
Carter is an authentic Christian…he pays a great deal of attention to all that red print in the New Testament…unlike televangelist grifter types like Falwell and Robertson.
nemesis
The Obamacare Supreme Court ruling was huge. It dampened the “Obama is illegal” nonsense.
Im eager to watch Hillz this afternoon. Hoping she looks McCains way and mutters something about cuttin a bitch.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Carter was like Truman – they expected him to be “their kind of person” based on his background and were shocked to find that he wasn’t. Both their reelections were marked with voter backlash from that group, yielding Dixiecrats in 1948 and Reagan Democrats in 1980.
Villago Delenda Est
@bemused:
Franken must be thinking bring.it.on!
bemused
@Villago Delenda Est:
I know I’m thinking that!